LATEST SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT TRENDS

AGILE,
CONTINUOUS DELIVERY, GIT, SOFTWARE

You must have heard Marc Andreessen’s warning that
“software is eating the world”, becoming the differentiator for industries that
were previously thought to be more manual. A great example for this is Tesla –
they’ve helped transform the automotive industry by essentially creating
drivable computers. You will find a deeper notion of software leading the way
for nearly every industry, and understand the trends driving software development
forward.

A survey was conducted on more than 18,000 software
development professionals, and here is what was discovered.

Best
development firms use agile, Git, and continuous delivery

We found that of software organizations across all industries:

·78% use a DVCS, such as Git.

·77% practice agile development.

·50% practice Continuous Delivery (CD).

These processes have become a normal thing with software
teams. Those who practice all three together are still only 49%.

How? The
iterative approach of Agile makes it easier for organization to pivot or change
priorities based on customer and market feedback. But, between the customers,
50% of agile teams reported using a mix of agile and non-agile techniques
indicating that teams are even adapting the process to meet their needs. Git’s
support for branch-and-merge workflows takes the pain out of collaborating on
code. And with a continuous delivery pipeline in place, shipping is a no-drama
event, which encourages smaller, more frequent and also less risky releases.

Development
teams are increasingly distributed

Regardless of industry, 72% of the professionals said
some portion of their team works remotely.

What
makes remote team collaboration and productivity possible?

A few ideas:

Git

As stated above, 78% of respondents said their team had
migrated to a DVCS, like Git. Using Git, the team members can work from any geography.
As a distributed version control system, each developer gets their own local
repository, complete with a full history of commits. With a full local history implies
that you don’t need a network connection to create commits, check past versions
of a file, or perform diffs between commits.

Distributed development also ensures a more reliable
development environment. As every developer working in a local repo, their
changes – and, more importantly, their missteps – are isolated. Combined with
basic development best practices like peer review and testing changes locally
before pushing them to the team’s shared repository, Git is a powerful tool.

Built-in
collaboration

Staying in sync as a team can be especially challenging
when your team isn’t located at a same place. Work Collaboration tools like
HipChat are needed for distributed teams. But group chat isn’t the only place
you require to discuss the work at hand. Most issue trackers let teammates
comment on issues so they can keep each other up to date. Same with development
tools: the ability to have an in-context discussion about a broken build or a code
change is now commonplace.

Automation
and visibility

Gradually, the tools are getting integrated, whether from
the same vendor or different vendors, to help with automatic sharing and
syncing of content. In fact, 82% of our customers reported that their source
code management tool was integrated with a build system, issue tracker, or
both.

Teams
are leaner and faster

Out of total, 86% of respondents said that the average
development team in their company has 10 or fewer members. This is a pretty
significant number so we decided to dig deeper into this.

Containers
– the hottest software development trend

56% of our customers reported using containers to spin up
test, staging, or production environments, compared to 34% of
non-customers. With a container, you can
define everything needed to run an application or service and use that
blueprint (called an “image”) to make new copies whenever you need to scale, or
simply share it with others. The ease and speed of using containers not only
makes development more efficient, but reduces IT overhead compared to
maintaining traditional bare-metal hardware.

Docker integrations for both Bitbucket and Bamboo testify
to how hot containers are right now. With Bitbucket, you can see source code
stats alongside your Docker repo. And for Bamboo, you can spin up more build
agents using Docker. Judging by what’s trending on Twitter and the session
schedule of every development conference on the planet, containers will be
software’s “it” technology for years to come.

Stay
ahead of the trends

No matter where your team compares in size or adopted
processes, having a great data set in front of you is the first step to staying
ahead of the trends. The more knowledge you gather, the more ability your team
will have to shift these trends and shape the future of software development.